They can handle a sword or carbine, a lance or a billiard cue,
And what they learned of botany was never learned at Kew.
They can follow the spoor of a cattle thief from the bleating of a ewe,
Though they’re only blooming hermaphrodites, policemen and
soldiers, too.
Since then I’ve met them everywhere, a-sleeping under the skies,
Hard as a packet of tenpenny nails, the sort as never dies.
They ain’t quite strict teetotallers, they like their Mountain Dew, And like it, of course, just half-and-half, whisky and soda too. With some dop and a government blanket, they lie in the air so clear, On the wide veldt in the moonlight with their troop-horse hobbled
near.
Lewis wrote much later, at the end of a life rich in incident:
In De Quincy’s words, I have taken happiness in its solid and its liquid form, both boiled and unboiled. The world is so full of beasts, birds, fishes. The swoop of pratincoles on a Kalahari locust swarm. Rosy circles of flamingos above a salt marsh. Crocodiles on Zambesi sandbanks, and the great shapes of hippo walking by night past the camp-fire. Salmon leaping the fall in a Highland river. And sounds – the thunder of hooves of a great herd of wildebeest. The high, singing note of a ship’s rigging in a full breeze (the crew of that ship lived in a filthy rat-haunted fo’c’sle, but they had a new Bible apiece given to them by the kind shipping company). Smells – the damp smell of Africa around the Primasole Bridge in the Sicily campaign. The linked odours of horse and leather in night marches of the older war. The smell of a beech wood in autumn, and the sweet scent of a flue-cured tobacco barn.
Then there are people – bushmen with their bows and arrows in Ovamboland. The stripped divers at Monkey Island. Early Brown-shirts waving their antennae at the Brandenburger Tor. The black and the white and the brown, the hairy-heeled and the sophisticated, the hard-boiled and half-baked.
Lewis made a career as an adventurer, or, if you like, as a sensationalist, in the sense of one who pursued sensations, preferably in wild places. He took the title of his published fragment of autobiography from an early experience at a circus in Delagoa Bay. Having paid his half-crown for admission, he was dismayed to discover that he was expected to put a hand in his pocket again, to view one special attraction. Challenged, its cockney keeper responded impenitently: ‘What do you expect, gents? Dragons are extra!’ In Lewis’s life, not much else was. His experiences would have adorned the pages of a Rider Haggard novel. He became well known in bar rooms and around campfires across southern Africa; uncomfortable without a rifle in his hand, or at least in his saddle bucket; welcoming a ‘roughhouse’; heedless of where next week’s grubstake would come from. In the second decade of the century he became briefly prominent in South African Unionist politics. When the First World War ended in 1918 Lewis, who had acquired a reputation as a public speaker, was dispatched around France to address disgruntled soldiers about their demobilisation. At one such gathering, a man called out accusingly from the crowd: ‘Aren’t you the same Lewis Hastings who murdered a man in Eloff Street during the Johannesburg diamond riots of 1913?’ Lewis, quite unabashed, called back: ‘I didn’t murder him. I broke my rifle stock over his head.’
Lewis argued that the disease-carrying insects of Africa fulfilled an admirable function by preserving the virginity of the vast tracts of bush he loved so much. He was irked when, in later life, he received a cool reception from the British Empire Society for his proposal, advanced not entirely in jest, to form a committee to protect the tsetse fly. In his early days as a professional hunter in Natal, he worked with two young Boers killing springbok, which in Kimberley fetched as much as a sovereign apiece for a ninety-pound carcass. He and his companions rode out to spend three days at a time pursuing the vast herds, shooting scores to be carried to market on a groaning wagon drawn by sixteen oxen. ‘To be nineteen years old,’ wrote Lewis, ‘to wake before sunrise with Halley’s Comet overhead, a rifle by one’s side, and a whole perfect day before one on the plains, that was surely very near the crown of life. It was so cold at early morning that the frost crackled beneath our feet and the rifle barrel seemed to burn one’s fingers.’
Having stalked a herd, often hundreds upon hundreds of springbok dancing across the veldt in great irregular columns, Lewis and his companions aimed to fire three, four, five shots apiece as fast as they could push bullets into the breeches of their old falling-block rifles, dropping as many beasts. Then they snatched the bridles of their ponies and set off in pursuit, racing to overtake the herd, bent low over their saddles: ‘The nearest waiting horseman goes for all he is worth, not towards the buck but across their line. Hardly checking from the gallop, he flings the reins over his horse’s neck, throws himself off, and firing from the knee, picks off one flying buck after another as the frantic multitude run, spring, and jink at close quarters…The excitement is packed into a few vivid minutes. Then it is over. The herd swings out of the danger zone.’ The hunters then retraced their trail, gathering and cleaning carcasses for the wagon.
Lewis lived long enough to see the civilised world recoil from the slaughter of African game. What men such as he did in the early years of the century came to be regarded with revulsion. The breech-loading rifle and improvements in transport enabled hunters to kill and market animals on an industrial scale, accomplishing in the first thirty years of the twentieth century an unprecedented depletion of the continent’s wildlife. In fairness to Lewis and his generation, over the ensuing eighty years habitat loss – the consequence of exploding human populations – has proved an even more fatal foe of Africa’s game than were the massacres committed by the old white hunters. But Lewis, looking back later, confessed that he regretted the wholesale killings of elephant and buffalo in which he participated so eagerly – by which, indeed, he made his living – in the years before 1914.
Around 1911, he became fired with the new craze for aviation. He formed a friendship with a man named John Weston, who brought the first aeroplane to South Africa – the usual double-kite contraption of the period, laced with piano wire and christened the ‘Weston-Farman biplane’. Lewis adored his flights with Weston: ‘The pilot occupied a flimsy sort of box open on all sides, and his passenger a kind of Madeira chair, just behind and above him. The sensation for anyone conveyed in this way, when the unwieldy machine drooped its nose earthwards, was terrific. No modern passenger can have any conception of the ecstasies of horror and rapture induced by a trip in a thing like the Weston-Farman.’ Weston the pioneer was so obsessed by the beauty of mechanical science that when a daughter was born to him, he insisted that she should be dressed in dungarees, and play only with nuts and bolts, in the hope that she might grow up into an aviatrix. In this he was disappointed, but unlike most of the early airmen, he survived to die in bed.
Weston’s plane and his own beloved Greener .303 falling-block rifle were the only examples of modern technology which Lewis enthusiastically embraced. Despite his use of firearms for hunting, he applauded the fact that the many quarrels in the Kimberley diamond diggings were settled with bare knuckles. He himself was a keen boxer, with or without gloves. In South African mining towns, he said, ‘the flourishing of guns was a mortal offence. I remember one case where a gentleman newly arrived from Western America, in the course of an argument in one of the canteens, drew a six-shooter. That was the end of him. A dozen willing hands cast him and his weapon into the muddy Vaal River. The diggings never saw him again. And yet, oddly enough, years afterwards in the Kalahari Desert during Botha’s campaign, I recognised this same American filibuster in the ranks of one of our mounted regiments. So his heart must have been in the right place, after all.’
Lewis became intimately acquainted with a host of buccaneers and freebooters such as Leander Starr Jameson of Jameson Raid notoriety, and the bandit-smuggler Scotty Smith. Far from harbouring any dislike for the Boers – the English war with them, remember, was not long finished – Lewis admired the hardy Dutch farmers. Courage and uncomplaining fortitude were the first qualities which he sought in a man, and most Afrikaners possessed them. He also warmed to black Africans, especially Khama, paramount chief of Bechuanaland – modern Botswana.